Bond’s book seeks key to ‘Global Peace with Islam’

America must pay greater attention to Southeast Asia, lest the area with the world’s largest concentration of Muslims become even more of a hotbed of terrorism and more hostile to U.S. interests.

That is the thesis of the new book co-authored by the senior U.S. Senator from Missouri, Christopher Bond, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Lewis M. Simons.

That much, Simons, a Jewish, liberal Democrat opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq, and Bond, a Christian, conservative Republican who voted to authorize the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein, could agree on. But not much more.

Simons said he initially declined to work with Bond on the book that eventually was published in October by John Wiley & Sons as “The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam.”

“I said no, because we just were so different, coming from such different places politically, that I was very skeptical,” Simons told The Chronicle this week. “I couldn’t imagine that it was going to work. But he is a good politician, and he kept pressing.”

Simons began his career as a foreign correspondent in 1967 during the Vietnam War. Since then, he has reported on war, politics and economics from throughout Southeast Asia as well as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. He was a staff correspondent for The Associated Press, the Washington Post, Time and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Simons won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1986 for exposing the billions that the Marcos family looted from the Philippines.

‘Work with people’
Bond told The Chronicle he asked a friend at the State Department to recommend a good reporter with whom he could work on his Southeast-Asian book idea, and that person recommended Simons.

“Lew and I worked very well together,” Bond said. “I wanted the book not to be partisan, but to lay out the need for what we call smart power … for more involvement, more attention, and to ramp up military efforts where we need them to build up our security. But military engagement alone won’t work. We have to use economic-development tools, trade and investment, education and personal exchanges; things like the Peace Corps. …

“The best thing we can do is not give a bunch of money to governments where, instead of doing what we want, it winds up in Swiss bank accounts. …”

Bond said, and the book argues, that the people of the region “admire America, but they think we don’t care about them.”

“We need to work with people like Indonesian President (Susilo) Yudhyono, whom I visited and sat with a week ago,” Bond said. “We need to support his government and help him with his challenges in fighting corruption, getting economic development, so the young men and women of Indonesia see a better future.”

Bond said he has talked with Yudhyono, for instance, about replicating the U.S. system of community colleges and the preschool “Parents and Teachers” program in Indonesia.

When asked how the United States could afford another foreign-aid commitment, Bond responded by saying: “These things cost very little compared to what we have to spend in a war. We’re far better off making educational exchanges.”

‘Poisonous Middle East’
“The Next Front” speaks of preventing Southeast Asia from becoming further infected with the Islamist radicalism flowing outward from the “the poisonous Middle East.” The book says that for millions of Muslims, the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was “a bitter pill (that) has lodged ever deeper in their throats as successive U.S. presidents have embraced Israel. …”

Further, “America’s quiet acquiescence to Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear weapons program, contrasted with its volatile rejection of Iran’s presumed efforts to develop its own, has further infuriated most Muslims …”

And yet when asked why the United States doesn’t simply abandon Israel to curry favor with the Arab/Muslim world, Bond responded by saying it would never happen. Nonetheless, he argues, progress can be made vis a vis the Muslim world.

“There are challenges throughout the Islamic world,” Bond said. “Al Qaeda and its friends in Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiya, have spread a violent form of Salafism that says you have to fight the infidels by killing them. We can’t respond by trying to kill all Muslims. The moderates in Southeast Asia are ones with whom we can and should work …”

Bond said that from the standpoint of U.S. values, including fighting terrorism, the leaders of Southeast Asian nations today vary from “outstanding” to “not great.”

“We can’t choose their governments,” Bond said wryly. “But if we want them to build security, they have to have an economic base to do it.”

That’s why, Bond said, he has “worked with the Missouri National Guard to send an agricultural-development team to Afghanistan” to spread the word about alternatives to opium-poppy growing. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are thought to profit from the drug trade.
Bond said he thinks some of the same smart-power principles he recommends in Southeast Asia could even be applied to the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.

“We want to help them (Israel) work with a form of smart power to have a peaceful, two-state coexistence with the Palestinians,” Bond said. “People can’t choose peace unless they have jobs and food for their families, and the Palestinians are certainly in that category.”

Sandals and sneakers
Sen. Bond said the book came about because after 23 years in the Senate, and one year before he gives up the seat, he wanted to do something different.

“I’ve been giving floor speeches time after time, and nobody listens,” Bond said.

Simons said the time was right for such a tome.

“What we are saying is that as (Islamic) fundamentalism rises, we ought to be paying more attention to Southeast Asia, not necessarily because it will lead to more violence, but because it is a shift from where they have stood for hundreds of years,” Simons said. “It’s almost ironic that as that is happening, they are asking for Americans to come and work alongside them on the ground.

“I did an op-ed for USA Today that ran last Monday, pegged to the Peace Corps going back to Indonesia for the first time in 44 years. That is happening not because we twisted arms in Indonesia, but because they asked for it. They say ‘Send Americans in sandals and sneakers, not army boots.’ ”

Sen. Bond, who is vice chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, has issued several statements in recent weeks criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of terrorism-related issues, including charging the would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber in a civilian court.

But Bond said there is no contradiction between his recommendations for acting tougher at home and more tender abroad.

“It is a war of terror that Al-Qaeda had declared on us, and it will continue,” he said. “The best way to deal with it is smart power. Just killing terrorists doesn’t work.”

Bond said he believes in the latest strategic approach being put forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. Army commander General Stanley McChrystal.

“McChrystal says we have to make sure we are killing only terrorists and not civilians,” Bond said. “That’s what we’re doing in Pakistan. … and we have high hopes it will work. We have to keep Afghanistan from reverting to Taliban control, because they have their own form of chaos in which Al-Qaeda flourishes.”

The trick will be to do that without alienating the world’s moderate Muslims.

“Many Muslims think we are at war with them,” Bond said. “We are against the terrorists; we’re for the people.”

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Write comment